The pen is one of several new features announced today as part of the museum’s reopening.

After a $91 million capital and endowment campaign and three years of renovations, the museum, housed inside the Carnegie Mansion in New York, will reopen its doors with 60% more gallery space, 50% more education space and a new name: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Cooper-Hewitt has been associated with the Smithsonian since it was acquired in 1967, and the new name reflects that history, museum officials said. With the added gallery space, the museum will dedicate its entire second floor to showcasing its permanent collection of more than 200,000 items and will maintain visiting hours through exhibition changes.

Visitors looking to play designer—a feature the museum promised during its renovations—will discover displays that include new technologies, opportunities for experiential learning and enhanced areas in which to rest, ponder and marvel.

Here are five things to look for:

1. An Interactive ‘Pen’

Every visitor to Cooper Hewitt will receive an interactive “pen” to let visitors “collect and create,” said director Caroline Baumann. The pen-shaped digital tool is originally modeled after a wand used for inventory control in healthcare. It will allow visitors to collect favorite pieces viewed in the museum into a personal online account, which can be accessed after leaving Carnegie Mansion and upon returning. Conceptualized as a pen in order to evoke the creative process, the tool provides the opportunity for anyone to “play designer,” Baumann said. An added benefit: It will also keep visitors away from their cellphones, said Seb Chan, director of Digital & Emerging Technologies .

2. The Process Lab

In what Ms. Baumann described as a new “primer” to the museum, visitors will experience firsthand the process of design in a new Process Lab. Visitors can engage with “design thinking”—the creative process utilized by designers—through a series of activities based in four categories: defining problems, getting ideas, prototyping and testing and refining, said Ellen Lupton, senior curator of contemporary design. One activity will involve manipulating light displayed through armatures with different materials like transparent, colored or perforated filters. The museum’s first dedicated education space open to the public, the lab aims to make visitors feel like they “own” the museum, said Caroline Payson, director of education. Even if people are unfamiliar with the museum’s offerings, they’ll be able to relate to the works after experimenting personally with the designer’s way of thinking.

3. The Immersion Room

Visitors will be able to access and experience Cooper Hewitt’s wallpaper collection in an entirely new way. Two perpendicular floor-to-ceiling screens will line the walls, and using their museum pens on a digital table, visitors will select wallpapers from the collection to display. And they’ll watch their own designs appear in real time as they draw directly onto the table.

4. Resting Grounds

The renovations have also added new garden space to enhance the museum experience. Neighbors and early arrivers will enjoy a 200-seat garden cafe open to the public before the museum welcomes visitors each morning. Inside the mansion, the original conservatory, previously used as an exhibition space, will become a dedicated seating area with views overlooking the bridge gallery and garden.

5. Original Details

Cooper Hewitt also focused on preserving the original design details of its home. Ms. Cisneros attributed much of the renovation’s three-year duration to the attention paid to conserving the mansion’s integrity and special qualities. Workers cleaned the wood features in rooms like the former Carnegie library, soon to become the “Process Lab,” with Q-tips and water. In an effort to both accommodate a new freight elevator and maintain the structure of the historic building, hidden hinge-systems have been incorporated into the woodwork. The first floor features a “secret” pivoting door, weighing 2,000 pounds, that will lay flat behind a visitor service desk by day and swing open to accommodate shipments by night.